


Hope

by Hadrian_Pendragons



Category: Dr. STONE (Anime), Dr. STONE (Manga)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, An Actual Adult Appears, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coma, Guilt, Hyouga doesn't exist, I made a doctor OC because lets be honest they should all be dead, M/M, Maybe - Freeform, Minor Character Death, Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Panic Attacks, People act their age, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sadistic Tsukasa, Survivor Guilt, The Stone Wars take a turn for the worst, Torture, Trauma, Tsukasa was the whumper, Whump, he's also dead rip, rip ukyou, that's a long ways away, tsukasa is the bad guy in this fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:53:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26136058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hadrian_Pendragons/pseuds/Hadrian_Pendragons
Summary: There really is only so much a person can take before they break.The Kingdom of Science learns this lesson the hard way.
Relationships: Ishigami Senkuu & Everyone, Ishigami Senkuu/Saionji Ukyou, Other Relationship Tags to Be Added
Comments: 13
Kudos: 69





	1. Chapter 1

Was there really a way to explain what this much pain felt like?

Bound wrists, scarred and hot and burning with raw skin and cracking scabs. A strip of fabric across his eyes, blocking out anything that could be considered a light in the darkness.

Dark, dark  _ dark. _

Dark, and quiet.

He can’t get used to the quiet. The things stuffed in his ears, little pieces of fabric making everything _dull_ and _quiet_ and _agonizing_ when all he can focus on is his own body.

What he  _ has  _ gotten used to is the smell of blood. The feeling of wet and sticky red he can’t see flowing out of the gashes across his body. He’s always left here with the cold shade of the cell, winter having passed and close to ending. He’s always left with his face shoved into the dirt, muddy with his own blood, and maybe tears- he doesn’t think he’s actually cried in weeks. He doesn’t think he’s eaten in a while, either, but usually someone shows up to shove something down his throat and half-drown him with a water pouch. It wasn’t like he could really feel the hunger anymore.

It hurt. Everything hurt. From his bare feet on freezing ground to his bruised cheeks driven into the sticky, muddy ground to the burning lacerations on his back and sides and arms and legs and the burns everywhere else. It’s cold, and he shivers, so hard his teeth clatter and feel like they’ll break under the pressure. He thinks the cold isn’t necessarily the only thing causing it. He feels too cold yet too hot.

He doesn’t move. He doesn’t care to move. There’s no point in it. If he does fight back, if he does defy  _ that man…  _ it only gets worse. The burns turn into stabbing, searing pain and the cuts turn into numbing cold as he’s dunked in a pool of water that he never knows is down there.

_ “What are you doing?” _

He should have kept his mouth shut.

_ “I-- I can’t let you do this, Tsukasa.” _

He should have  _ shut up. _

_ “Then maybe you would rather take the punishment yourself?” _

The memory just sends a spike of fear and adrenaline through his body. It makes him tense. Makes everything hurt, but for a second, before it numbs with pent up energy.

Then it all fades. So, so quickly, because there isn’t anywhere to direct it.

He was afraid.

So, so afraid.

Afraid enough, despite all the pain, that he couldn’t even finish what he started.

He just wishes… he could hear something.  _ Anything. _

He wishes it wasn’t so  _ quiet. _

  
  
  
  
  


“Senkuu, are you sure? We can search the rest of them-”

“I can’t just leave it all to you guys, now can I?” He smirks. He smirks and lies through his teeth, and he’s certain Kohaku and Chrome and Nikki know it, but his interruption gets Chrome to stop talking. Kohaku still gives him a look, anyway, and Nikki just walks on ahead of them toward the next cell.

“Honestly, you’re so stubborn,” Kohaku mutters, slapping Chrome on the back and pushing past the both of them. “Get a move on, then, boys. I want out of this place as soon as possible.”

Senkuu’s smirk drops as Chrome grumbles and follows, and he takes up the rear. He glances at each of the smaller caves this far up the “prison”... Tsukasa hadn’t played around. There had been several people up here. Several half-buried  _ corpses,  _ too. All of the people who had defied him, all who had tried to oppose him.

Senkuu thinks they were strong and brave to think the man was wrong. He thinks they were dumb to try something against someone clearly stronger than them. He thinks the ones alive were lucky to have made it until help arrived.

He thinks all of that of himself, too.

And every one they come across, every person they help re-bury and prisoner Kohaku carries down to the infirmary, settles a new weight across his shoulders. A heavy one, a damning one, because none of this would have been if he’d never wasted that revival fluid on someone like Tsukasa Shishio.

On a  _ murderer. _

He shakes his head and sighs, trying to lift his shoulders higher and pick his chin up. He’s tired. He’s so, so tired, and he hadn’t been able to rest in the past four days, the past four days of preparing, of fighting, of damage control. He would wonder how ninety-six hours could feel so long, but he knew exactly how long ninety-six hours felt like, no matter how much had happened in that span of time.

Senkuu puts one foot in front of the other and follows the three ahead of him, until they make it to the last real cell.

This one’s deeper than the others. There’s darkness in the back of it, but the gate is locked tight. Chrome sets to cutting the bindings on the wooden grates, and Senkuu just wishes that this one will be empty.

He doesn’t have much hope for that, but he can still wish with everything he has that no one else has fallen to his mistakes.

Nikki goes first. Her eyes, from the moment Senkuu had met her face to face, have been sunken and dark and, no matter what they came across, she was always able to take it with little more than a sigh and a slightly heavier slump in her shoulders. She was strong, but she did what she had to, and he thinks that’s probably how she survived long enough for them to get there.

Senkuu, meanwhile, lights up the makeshift flashlight and follows behind her. Chrome behind him, and Kohaku at the back. They walk a lot further than any of the caves before. 

“Is this a cave or a tunnel?” Senkuu asks, peering forward into the darkness. It stretches, and it swirls, and it feels ominous and makes something settle in the pit of his stomach.

He pauses. Chrome bumps into him from behind. Nikki opens her mouth to answer, but Senkuu suddenly starts walking  _ faster  _ and past all of them.

“Senkuu, what-?”

Kohaku stops to rush after him, despite the lack of answer to the half-question. He can’t really explain how the rock in the pit of his stomach was screaming at him that something was wrong here, or that he felt the need to rush further in rather than stop and decide on a course of action. 

‘Feelings’ like that couldn’t be explained, in the first place. All he could do was trust it or ignore it.

The last time he’d ignored it, he’d ended up dead.

“Just hurry up,” he calls back, shining the light ahead of him and walking forward with singular purpose, eyes on the ground before him, because the last thing he wants is to stumble over a body again. His mind fills with singular purpose and his action is simple, so all energy gets diverted into a heavy jog. Any more, and he’d tire himself out too quickly to do anything.

But it only takes up to- almost exactly- sixty ticks in his mind for them to spot the back wall.

He stops. Freezes in his tracks, and shines the light directly at the space between him and the wall, and feels a number of things all at once.

The first is disgust. The kind that comes with the smell of something rancid suddenly being shoved in his face, the kind that makes his stomach churn and his body recoil. The second is a hot, boiling anger and frustration, as his mind supplies exactly what happened here.

The third- the third is panic. Panic that comes the moment he realizes that the person, lying in a puddle of blood and filth with wounds and infection running amok on his skin, is still  _ breathing. _

“Fuck,” he curses, and he thinks he hears Chrome do the same, but his ears fill with white noise as everything switches into overdrive.  _ “Fuck.  _ Chrome, get the fuck over here!”

He drops down, Chrome right beside him, digging in the bag of medical supplies they’d brought along, but it- it wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be enough to handle this.

Senkuu checks for a pulse. Slow. Slow, agonized, but  _ there,  _ despite cold and clammy skin. Senkuu realizes just how chilling the air in here is.

He forces himself to quit looking at everything with tunnel vision and does a check-over.

Ankles and wrists, bound. Probably for a long time, considering the state of them. Arms pulled back into the binds, covered in scrapes and bruises and half-healed scars. Torso- that’s the worst, probably. The wounds are way too deep. Deep and infected and left way too long without care. Others look like they might have  _ been  _ taken care of, once upon a time, but then the notion of it was given up on to speed up the inevitable.

A blindfold. Fabric stuffed in his ears. Hair almost brown, with dried blood and muck and-

Senkuu takes a breath.  _ Refuses  _ to choke on the smell. And he reaches for the bag.

Chrome knew how to stitch up wounds, but they couldn’t stitch the infected ones. Everything… everything needed to be cleaned. And this was definitely not the location to do so. 

_ Sensory deprivation.  _ He knows that, from some of the others they’d found, blindfolded and shoved in the dark. Taking it off suddenly might just send him into shock, and that was the last thing they needed. 

He takes another breath. 

“Senkuu.”

He looks up. 

Chrome has a hand hovering over his shoulder. Kohaku’s crouched on the other side of the person, looking at him, waiting for a decision. Nikki is standing to their left, mouth open, eyes wide.

He makes a note to ask her about it later. Then he turns to Chrome, “Wrap whatever looks worst. Enough so it doesn’t end up disturbed when we bring him down. Undo the bindings, don’t take off the blindfold or the-- earplugs. Kohaku-” he turns to her, and she takes the snap in his voice with stride, having been in her own form of attention the moment they stumbled across the man. “Go tell Yuzuriha i need a stretcher, asap. Fast as you can, don’t stop for anything else, bring it right back here.”

“On it,” she nods, and he tosses her the spare flashlight before she disappears into the dark.

Senkuu swallows. Clenches and unclenches his hands. And then he grabs some bandages and gets to work, himself.

It all looks… so  _ painful.  _ He touches the man’s skin, and he isn’t sure if he’s at all aware, but he doesn’t get a reaction. Not so much as a flinch. He wants nothing more than to rip that blindfold off, at least, let the man  _ see. _

He doesn’t know how long he’s been trapped here. He hasn’t gotten good enough at looking at wounds to tell that, yet. He wishes he never will.

But, again, he doesn’t have much hope that will happen.

“Who is he?” Chrome speaks up, tearing Senkuu out of his own thoughts and reminding him to be more gentle with the wounds, to calm his shaking hands and unclench his fingers. He glances at Chrome. Chrome glances at Nikki. He spares one second to shove the anxiety out of the way and be proud of Chrome’s observation skills once more, before he, too, gives Nikki an inquiring look.

She’s crouched down nearby, watching them work, keeping out of the way until she’s needed. Senkuu looks away as she opens her mouth, focusing on what his hands are doing.

“He’s Ukyou Saionji,” she says, voice low and raw. “He… I… I thought he  _ died,  _ hell… He stood up for me. And a few others. Months ago…”

_ Months.  _ Months. Months in this place.

_ Fuck. _

Senkuu wonders if he can get anyone to run back to Ishigami Village and grab some of the good alcohol. He hasn’t drank much, since he woke up here- not enough to get irresponsibly sloshed, that’s for sure- but he thinks for once, he might just like to drown everything and numb his brain.

“Is he… Is he gonna make it?” Chrome asks again, worried, reaching into the bag for another roll of bandages. “This… this is all we brought.”

“It’ll just have to be enough,” he says, glancing down the cave. Kohaku had left four minutes ago. She could make it down this mountain on her own in two. Yuzuriha’s quick, she’ll have a crude stretcher made in three. So, three more minutes.

Senkuu glances down, and somehow, he gets the urge to brush his hand over the man’s bangs. He lets his hold on the bandages slip, and does so. He’s got a fever, searing in his forehead. Senkuu bites back another curse. “... that’s a tough one, Chrome,” he says, quietly. “We’re gonna try, though. Got it?”

That seems to satisfy Chrome. For some reason, Senkuu feels something else burn in the pit of his stomach.

He imagines burying this man, just like all the others, with a  _ we tried  _ all he had to show for it.

He thinks that, even if it kills him, he won’t let this man die.

Ukyou Saionji was going to live. That was the  _ bare minimum  _ Senkuu could do.


	2. Chapter 2

_ “Hey!” Nikki thinks she’s crazy. Nikki thinks she’s probably going to die today. “He’s sick! Why are you pushing him so hard?” _

_ She didn’t even know the guy, kneeling on the muddy ground, obviously down with some sort of flu, hands gripping onto the broken pieces of a clay pot. She does know the man standing over him, however. Tall. Tough. Deadly, and proud of it, given how he tells  _ **_that_ ** _ story to everyone that came to be in the Empire of Might. _

_ Dark, piercing eyes lock onto hers and stop her in her tracks, both feet planted to the ground. Her hands fist at her sides. She knew this was a mistake, but how much of one, exactly, she really didn’t want to find out. _

_ A little late for regrets, though. _

_ “If he can’t do his part, then maybe he isn’t cut out for our new world,” is the only answer she gets, before a hand starts reaching down, and the guy flinches, and she takes a shocked step forward to do something- what could she do,  _ **_what could she-_ **

_ Something whizzes past her head. Fast, precice, it lands directly in Tsukasa’s path.  _

_ A flint tipped arrow digs itself between Tsukasa and the guy Nikki didn’t know. _

_ Tsukasa looks up. Nikki whirls around. _

_ She’s met with a smile. _

_ No- he isn’t looking at her-  _ **_Tsukasa_ ** _ is met with a smile, cold and sharp and absolutely done with all of this. She’s never seen that look on Ukyou Saionji’s face. She doesn’t think she’s seen anything but mild interest in the entire time she’s known him. _

_ Right now, she doesn’t do anything but back out of his way as he steps past her. _

_ “What are you doing, Ukyou?” Tsukasa asks. _

_ “This isn’t right,” he says. Low. Dangerously so. “And you know it.” _

_ Tsukasa’s eyes are livid, but- interested. She shivers. _

_ “This is the way things are supposed to be,” Tsukasa answers, turning to fully face him. Nikki slips around them, helping the sick guy up and pulling him further away from the scene. _

_ “I… I can’t let you do this, Tsukasa. It isn’t right.” _

_ “So you’re defying me,” Tsukasa hums in that odd way of his, tilting his head and smiling. “Then maybe you would rather take the punishment yourself? If you agree, then those two,” he jerks his head towards Nikki and she realizes that they wouldn’t have been able to get away without being seen, “can live.” _

_ Ukyou’s eyes flick to her and the guy she doesn’t know. They look resigned. They look… dead, almost. _

_ But not really. Nikki’s already seen what real dead eyes look like, and that was once too many in this fucked up new world. _

_ Then, in the span of time it takes for her to blink, there’s an arrow notched and ready to fly at Tsukasa’s head. _

_ Except, Tsukasa’s not where he was once standing. He’s closed the distance and managed to put his hand on Ukyou’s head, his other hand on the arm holding the bowstring back. _

_ She thought not being able to see people move was something that only happened in movies and anime. A hysterical smile creeps over her face at the thought. It drops in fear when she hears a  _ **_snap._ **

_ The arrow falls to the ground. Ukyou grits his teeth. And jerks a broken wrist to his chest as he tries to hit Tsukasa with the bow itself.  _

_ Even Nikki knows that it’s just a pitiful attempt at attack. _

_ The bow clatters to the ground. Ukyou drops right beside it, head shoved down and face pressed against the dirt. _

_ He glares at Tsukasa.  _

_ Tsukasa simply smiles. _

_ Smiles and takes his arm and drags him up. _

_ And that’s the last time Nikki saw Ukyou Saionji for the next four months. _

  
  
  
  
  


Nikki sits on a hastily built bench outside the infirmary. Or, what they’re calling an infirmary. It was actually just a really large tarp thrown over some quick rigging and nailed down tight at the edges. Honestly, it seemed par for the course for a former warzone.

She crosses her arms and closes her eyes for just a moment, and she’s back in that warzone, explosions ringing in her ears and diving for cover when  _ goddamn explosive paper planes  _ went flying.

Then she snaps her eyes open and shoves it all away, again. It’s only been a couple of days. Maybe it would get easier to forget.

She thinks that’s a false hope.

“How are you doing, Nikki?”

She blinks and looks over, and Yuzuriha doesn’t stand taller than her even when she’s sitting down. Nikki stares for a moment at the kind yet strained smile and the tiredness in Yuzuriha’s eyes before she sighs and stands up from the bench.

“Just wanted to check up on someone,” she says, glancing toward the entrance. “But I couldn’t bring myself to walk inside.”

Yuzuriha follows her gaze and nods. “Everyone’s alive… but he’s... “

Her smile fades, and Nikki thinks she shouldn’t have come here.

“It’s fine,” she lies, because nothing about this was  _ fine,  _ “I’ll just go find something to help with. Take care of yourself, too, got it?”

Yuzuriha nods at her, despite still staring at the entrance, and Nikki walks away.

She wonders if she’s just afraid of seeing him. Seeing him like  _ that.  _ The guy had saved her, and she’d just… written him off as dead, and tried to forget.

Now, every time she closed her eyes, she couldn’t forget.

She couldn’t ever forget the shit they’d all been put through.

_ To hell with the Empire of Might. _

She hopes Tsukasa’s rotting in his grave.

  
  
  
  
  


Yuzuriha braces herself once more, and pushes the curtain aside.

The first person she looks for is Senkuu. Senkuu, who hasn’t left that man’s side since Kohaku and Nikki had carried him down the mountain. He’s slumped over a table- a simple work-bench, created hastily by Kaseki, whom Yuzuriha would have loved to sit down with and talk to under any other circumstance- and sleeping. For once in his life. 

She thinks maybe they  _ should _ take care of themselves more. She wonders if they really have the time.

Yuzuriha sighs through her nose and looks around the room, willing to give him more time to rest before he inevitably wakes up. He doesn’t stay down for long, she’s noticed. Even in just the few days they’ve finally been reunited, she notices that things are different.

She knows she’s different, too. As is Taiju.

Inside the tent, there are twenty beds lined up, ten on both sides. It was a quick job, and they don’t have a lot in the way of sanitation, but Senkuu and Chrome, whom she’s learning is quite brilliant in his own right, are able to work… not quite miracles. The reliance on miracles was long gone. But they did manage to create or substitute the things they needed.

Several of Tsukasa’s people were here. The people that had fought them out of fear of their own leader, only to jump ship at the sight of a cliffside lighting up in flames. Only to surrender in injury, even as Senkuu refused to take no for an answer and started wrapping up the nearest wounded person. 

That is something she knows is weighing on Senkuu. For him, science was a tool, yes… but he never wanted people to  _ fear  _ it.

Not the thing that made him smile and laugh in excitement.

Not in the way so many people had looked at Tsukasa’s power and followed without another option.

One of those people was Yo, who lay in the far corner, staring at the ceiling with a look of concentration. He hadn’t stayed on Tsukasa’s side long after seeing the dynamite on display, and had ended up with a stab wound in his abdomen. She prepares to wander over, but pauses when she hears a sob.

The other beds in the infirmary are occupied by Senkuu’s people. They didn’t have many fighters, but the ones they did were resilient. Magma and Kohaku had been up in no time, barely even hurt. Kinrou, on the other hand, had been struck protecting his brother.

Had taken a blow to the head to protect his brother, who had cried over him all the way through help arriving. 

Kinrou was getting better. He  _ was.  _

But he hasn’t woken up yet.

Yuzuriha sometimes wondered what the results would have been, if they’d been able to get to him sooner. Take care of the head injury quicker. 

But as it was, Ginrou was slumped at the end of the bed, trying not to cry. Trying not to be loud in the infirmary, after Taiju had tried to console him. Taiju had been hurt, too, but he’d gotten up in no time.

She hates that she’s relieved it wasn’t Taiju lying on the bed, her crying over him.

“Ginrou,” she calls out, softly, stepping up and placing a hand on his shoulder. He looks up at her. Startled, almost, but it doesn’t last long before he turns tear-filled eyes back to his brother.

“He’ll get better,” Yuzuriha says, because if he was strong enough to protect someone he cared about, he was strong enough to pull through this. She wonders if she’s idealistic. She thinks she certainly is glad she can still think like that.

“... he—“ Ginrou sniffs and crosses his arms over the bed. “He saved me. And— and now he’s…”

He hides his face and doesn’t say anything more. Yuzuriha lets him go. She doesn’t know what else to say. 

It frustrates her. That things are so different, that everything has changed so quickly. She thought, back when she’d woken up, that if she had her friends beside her, everything would be alright in the end. 

Now she thinks that they’re all just lucky to be alive. 

Maybe she isn’t all that idealistic after all. 

She leaves Ginrou there. She can’t do anything, so she moves on, tries not to think too hard about it. Tries not to let it weigh her down. There was always something else needing to be done. 

Instead, she moves over to Senkuu and Ukyou. 

They had gotten him clean the moment they brought him down. Senkuu had immediately taken the lead. Had done everything he could have. 

Yuzuriha doesn’t think she’s seen him like that before. With bags under his eyes, but a fire burning so deep within them that she could barely tell him to move over and let her help. 

It was painful to look at what Tsukasa had done. She hadn’t known Ukyou before he’d been taken away, but she had heard from Nikki what he had tried to do, and now she had seen the punishment for it. 

Now, a pale, white-haired man lay covered in too many bandages, wet cloths struggling to extract the fever and infection out of his forehead and wounds, eyes no longer covered by a binding but with a softer cloth laid over them, and ears finally free. 

He’d woken up, just once, after they’d taken the leather from them. 

But he hadn’t done more than grimace and wince and whine before falling back to unconsciousness. 

Yuzuriha took a moment to replace the cloth. To gather the used ones for a thorough cleaning and disinfecting.

Then she hears it. 

_ “.... three thousand eight hundred and twenty two… three thousand eight hundred and twenty three…” _

She does the math. A little over an hour. But he wasn’t resting. Not really. 

She sets down the cloth and moves to shake his shoulders.

Senkuu jerks up with the slightest touch, tense and breathing heavy. His eyes dart around. Landing first on his hands, then on the tent wall, then on Ukyou before finding Yuzuriha behind him. 

She hates how tired he looks. 

“... sorry,” he mutters, a shuddering breath in his lungs. “I’m up.”

She knows nothing she can say could really make it better. So she looks over his shoulder in hopes of distracting him, “What are you working on?”

It’s a list. A list of names, bulleted with bits of information beside them. She sees “surgeon” and “pharmacist” along the notes. 

“Looking for a doctor,” he sighs, turning back to the table. He lets her keep her hands on his shoulders. She appreciates being able to comfort him. “I’m trying to remember every famous one I could think of. News stories, articles,” he taps his charcoal stick to his forehead, leaving a bit of it smeared along his temple. It’s starting to get warmer in the daytime. “Anything that can help. Then we’ll just have to… find them.”

He drops his hands to either side of the page. 

“Sooner than later.”

“So… someone who knows people?” She asks, biting her lip. Senkuu looks up at her again, locking onto the words with sharp eyes. 

“He had someone like that.” He doesn’t say it as a question. “Who?”

“She’s… kind of hard to deal with,” Yuzuriha admits. “She was a reporter, and she was really on Tsukasa’s side at first.”

“At first?”

“... Minami thought he was ultimately going to be a good person, until…. until the first ones…”

Yuzuriha drops her head into his hair. He reaches up and grips her arms comfortingly. She takes a breath and lets the memories pass. 

“We’ll have to find her, first,” Yuzuriha says, quietly. “She ran off the moment the fighting ended.”

He sighs, heavy, and she thinks his shoulders are way too tense. 

“... I’ll take care of that, then. I’ll send Taiju back to help you out, too. Ginrou,” he looks over to the bed she’d come from, and Ginrou picks his head up. “If anything happens, you keep Yuzuriha safe.”

He nods, sitting up straighter and lifting his shoulders. Yuzuriha thinks Senkuu said that more to give him something to do than for actual protection. 

No one here would want to hurt them. Not after everything that happened. 

She nods to him, and he puts his paper under a weight on the table and stands up. 

She lets him go. She watches him pause and look around the room, and down at Ukyou. Then he bumps her shoulder as he leaves the infirmary. 

Yuzuriha stares after him and imagines a world where he didn’t look so tired. 

Then she gets back to work.


	3. Chapter 3

“No.  _ No  _ way! There is  _ no way I’m getting involved with- with you- insane  _ people ever again!”

Minami Hokutozai took  _ several  _ steps back, and Gen fluidly slipped in between the space that was now present between her and Senkuu.

“Minami-chan, please,” he lifts his hands placatingly, mostly to show his free hands, “we’re not asking you to join us, simply to help us a bit.”

This, of course, does not calm her at all. He didn’t truly expect it to. Not when she was completely on edge, eyes wide and narrow, hair askew and shoulders and hands tense as if ready for attack.

She simply looks him up and down and says, “Gen Asagiri, I know exactly how much of a liar you are, so keep you, your friends, and all those explosives away from me.”

He tries to swallow back his own opinion on that. He really, really does, but there’s moments he finds his hands still shaking and his body still flinching from too-loud sounds, and he can’t help but feel his mask slip, “These friends of mine saved your life, Minami-chan.”

“You’re all a bunch of  _ insane murderers, that’s what you are.”  _ She looks angry, defensive,  _ afraid.  _ “And I’m not following another one. You can’t trick me.”

Afraid of him, Gen Asagiri, and Senkuu Ishigami, the two weakest people in their Kingdom. It makes him snap his mouth shut and chide himself, because they weren’t here to argue. They were here to get her assistance. He could deal with a few harsh words if it meant getting what Senkuu needed.

“Do you truly believe there is anyone among us that would hurt you? That  _ could,  _ even if we were what you say we are?” He says, glancing back at Senkuu. “Our main goal was to make sure  _ Tsukasa  _ could not hurt anyone. Senkuu-chan here even allows our former enemies to stay and heal. Surely, that must mean something to you.”

She still glares. She still holds her ground and stares at them with suspicion and hysterical fear. 

“And why should I trust you?”

Senkuu steps up beside him. He waves slightly, and Gen takes one step back. 

Gen wonders how anyone could look Senkuu in the eye, in all the weight he carries on his shoulders, and think him in any way a bad person. 

“We did what we had to, to protect people. I never wanted it to go that far,” Senkuu clenches his fists. “But here we are, and there isn’t any going back. We’re trying to save as many lives as we can— lives Tsukasa wanted to ruin— and we need you to help us. Can you do that much?”

Her lips press thin. She continues to look between them, but Gen can see the gears turning, can see the words getting there. 

“If you do,” Gen says, a kind smile on his face, “We’ll make sure no one will bother you.”

Her left cheek twitches. Gen holds her gaze. Senkuu does the same. 

She crosses her arms, still defensive, but less panicked. “Just promise to stay away from me, after.”

Senkuu nods instantly, “Agreed.”

Gen thinks he’s honestly a bit happy they don’t have to deal with her for very long. She was much too irrational for his tastes. 

Senkuu turns and catches his eye for a moment. 

Gen thinks he’s starting to see the silent  _ thank you _ in his eyes. 

He thinks, as he watches Senkuu turn away, and follows behind him and Minami, that Senkuu is much too nice for his own good. 

He thinks that’s probably for the better of their Kingdom, considering Tsukasa had been much too cruel.

  
  
  
  
  


The breath he takes is significantly less painful than before. 

Not by much. Not  _ better  _ in any sense of the word. But… it hurts less. 

He thinks he must be dreaming, if anything was starting to hurt less. 

He counts them.  _ One. Two. Three. Four.  _ He counts every breath he’s able to take, feels them in his chest. He feels warm. He can feel something restricting around him, around his arms and legs, and he wonders if this is something new, if the  _ less  _ is going to get  _ worse.  _

Then he feels a hand. Gentle, careful, removing those restrictions. Pulling them away. Applying something cool and relieving and then putting them back. Wrapping him up. 

Bandages. 

When was the last time Tsukasa bothered to bandage him?

He shifts. Just slightly. Forces a deeper breath into his lungs. 

He hears a gasp. 

He  _ hears.  _

_ He hears.  _

His heart pounds, his mind screeches to a halt, adrenaline rushes through his sluggish veins. He tenses, and that makes it  _ hurt more,  _ and he feels a smile creep over his face. 

He laughs. 

It’s probably some level of insanity. He can understand that much. He knows the stories, the warnings, the training, to make sure every submariner is able to handle the pressure and the quiet that comes with being miles beneath the surface of the ocean.

He laughs and feels his voice start to crawl out of his throat, _ “Why…? Why now…?” _

He curls in, on his side, and it pulls at  _ everything,  _ and he feels those hands trying to stop him, abandoning the bandages. 

He hears a voice. But it sounds warbled, and he wonders how his ears can be so stuffy yet finally unrestricted. He doesn’t know what the words say. He doesn’t think he cares to know. 

_ Please. Please. Don’t touch me. Don’t… _

He feels something on his face. Sliding off his face. 

He instantly throws his hands up and covers his eyes because it’s  _ bright  _ and  _ how long had he wanted to finally see something other than darkness?  _ But it’s  _ too  _ bright. It makes his eyes burn and sends a searing spike through his already pounding head. 

He freezes. Feels a shiver trail through his body, and it should be cold. He can feel it. He can still feel the cold of the cave and the darkness and the  _ pain— _

“Hey,” he hears, right in his ear. It makes his eardrums itch. He feels another set of hands. This time more calloused. Not strong, but enough they hold onto his forearms carefully. 

_ Don’t touch me.  _

“You’ve got to relax. We can’t help unless you let us.”

He feels one of his breaths catch in his throat. 

The cloth— a wet cloth— goes back to his forehead. It covers his eyes, when his hands are tugged away from his face. 

He hates,  _ hates  _ how it instantly makes him slump into the— whatever he was lying on. 

He gives up. He had already given up. He had already resigned himself to never getting away, when he lost count of the number of times Tsukasa had visited him. 

He should have stayed quiet. That would have saved him. 

_ But maybe it would have hurt more.  _

His mind blurs. He doesn’t know where he is, but does it matter?

_ “You’re certainly more stubborn than you’re given credit for.” _

He doesn’t drop the smile. 

He doesn’t know why he bothers. 

  
  
  
  
  


Taiju stands at the entrance to the infirmary. His face sets itself into a determined frown, and his arms cross over his chest in stubbornness. No one tries to get in, despite Senkuu’s order to keep everyone out, but the Minami lady looks impatient and jumpy and Gen just stands there with a smile. 

Taiju keeps his mouth pressed into a thin line and thinks he’s thinking too much. Thinking wasn’t Taiju’s job. That had always been Senkuu’s. But right now, he thought that no one was really allowed to do just one job. 

He hears a yell from inside. It’s in a lot of pain. He hears Yo say something sharp and Ginrou squeak, but it calms down quickly. 

Taiju knows they can’t handle this on their own. 

They’re in over their heads, this time.

Senkuu looks frustrated and backed into a corner. 

“It’s okay, Big Oaf,” he hears. Taiju turns around. 

Senkuu looks  _ tired.  _

Eyes darker than normal, one hand clenched at his side and the other holding a piece of paper with his recognizable scrawl down it. 

Taiju stands back, “Are they okay?”

“Yuzuriha’s fine,” he says immediately. He whispers the next part to no one in particular. “We’re gonna have to move fast, though.”

He steps out, and turns to Minami, holding out the paper in his hand. “I dunno if this would mean anything to you, but I tried to make a list of names. Anything recognizable?”

She gives it a cursory glance. Then she snatches it from his hand. Senkuu lets her take it, no reaction on his face. 

She runs her eyes down it, quick and efficient, and then she wads it up and tosses it to Gen, who catches it with a slight annoyed crease in his eyebrows. 

“I know who you’re going to want,” she purses her lips, and Taiju thinks she’s a lot meaner now than she was in the beginning. “We’re going to have to search around the hospital area. He was most likely on call that afternoon.”

“If we’re excavating, we’ll need something more than shovels,” Senkuu sighs, shoulders slumping. “I hope you don’t mind more explosives.”

Her eyes narrow, but she crosses her arms and turns away, “I’m just there for identification. Do what you want.”

She walks off, and Gen sighs, watching after her, “I’ll gather our muscle team, then?”

“Get Chrome, too,” Senkuu says. “I want his help with the nitro.”

“Leave it to me!” Gen smiles, turning on his heel, and suddenly he doesn't seem as exhausted. Taiju thinks it’s fake. 

Taiju places a hand on Senkuu’s shoulder. 

“Senkuu,” he pauses. “You should rest.”

“No time for that, Big Oaf,” he runs a hand down his face. “... I’ll rest as soon as no one’s dying.”

“Just… don’t hurt yourself? Okay?”

“Okay, Taiju. Watch things around here for me?”

“You got it.”

Taiju lets him go, and Senkuu walks off toward their current revival fluid stash. Taiju watches him for a moment, then ducks back into the infirmary tent. 

Yuzuriha sits at that white-haired man’s side, re-wrapping his wrists. Ginrou’s sitting beside Kinrou, but he’s sitting up straighter than he had been, watching the room. Yo’s lying in his bed, looking like he wants to get up and move, but the injury to his leg won’t let him. 

There are a few other people in the room, but Taiju focuses on Yuzuriha and moves to her. 

She finishes what she’s doing and leans into his side. He wraps an arm around her. 

“... It’ll be okay, Yuzuriha,” he says, quietly, because he doesn’t want to make things worse for anyone here. “We’ll figure it out.”

She hums and turns her face into his side, and he just wants to wrap her up and make her laugh and smile. 

He doesn’t think she wants that right now, though.

“I’m right here.”

“Thank you, Taiju.”


	4. Chapter 4

Chrome ducks down as low as he can get, Senkuu right beside him, and Nikki and Kohaku waiting in the wings. The ground shakes. Something pops in his ears, leaving a ring in them. He waits long enough that the dust should be settled before standing back up and peering at the expanse that, according to Senkuu, had once held a building called the Tokyo Metropolitan Hospital. 

It’s much neater than what he remembers from a few days ago. It isn’t a mess of rubble and dust and—  _ bodies—  _ lying strewn across the field. It’s holes drilled into the ground, a stick of dynamite added to them, an ignition pulled all the way to their safe location and then the resulting opening cleared away and searched through. 

It’s neat. It’s useful. It’s what he thinks this was supposed to be used for. 

Senkuu elbows his arm lightly, pulling him out of his thoughts, and waves over their impromptu excavation team. “We gotta move faster, Chrome.”

“On it!” He shakes himself free of the memory and runs after Nikki and Kohaku and everyone else helping with the search for the doctor. Minami stands back and watches them, and Chrome ignores her for the most part.

It’s been hours. They work quickly and efficiently, and if any pieces are broken, Senkuu starts piecing them together himself, as much as he can. He had eventually cursed, scratched his head, and sent someone after Yuzuriha. Chrome thinks Senkuu normally would have thought to bring her along beforehand. He wonders if Senkuu’s brain is as tired as Chrome’s. 

He shuffles through the rocks, and spots another statue. 

“Over here!”

He thinks his body is as tired as his mind. He thinks he’s seen way too many dead people lately. More, even, than when that famine had swept over the village and taken so many of their adults, when he was a child. 

Senkuu says this doctor can help, though, so Chrome keeps digging. 

And digging. 

And digging. 

And he never thought, ever in his life, that he would get sick of digging. 

“Ryoushi Kobayashi,” Minami finally explains after a few prods, during a short break. “I’m a bit surprised he wasn’t on your list, though I suppose he wouldn’t be publicly famous enough to find without some digging. He’s a military doctor. A good one. People consulted him from all over.”

“Military doctor,” Senkuu’s eyes flick closed. “Smart.”

“He’ll know how to handle the… worst of it.” Minami grimaces and looks away. “... I heard Saionji’s still alive.”

“He’s part of the reason we’re looking for our doctor, yeah.”

Senkuu stares at her. She glances down at the ground. 

“You know, I was the one that found him,” she says, without any particular tone. “He’s not that famous, either, and he’s only been in the military a few years. But he’s got a talent for hearing.” 

“That sounds kind of vague.”

She scoffs and rolls her eyes. “I mean it literally. He has a reputation in the navy for being one of the best sonar technicians they had. And on top of that, no one could ever sneak up on him.”

She stops and drops her gaze again. “I never knew he was an idiot.”

Chrome thinks that might be a bit harsh on the guy he helped keep alive. 

But he hasn’t met him, yet. Not really. What did he know?

He knew that this Ukyou had protected Nikki and others under Tsukasa at the risk of his own life. Chrome can admire that. 

“... well, you can tell him that when he’s not dying,” Senkuu hisses, standing up and cracking his neck in that habit of his. “Let's get back to it.”

Chrome thinks he really wants to find this doctor soon. Because he doesn’t like the feeling he gets when Senkuu’s shoulders tense that much. 

He doesn’t like the tightening of his gut when he catches Senkuu’s eyes looking like  _ that.  _

Like it’s all his fault. 

He wants to say something. But he can’t figure out what would even get through to their chief.

Senkuu pushes himself. He works too hard, he thinks too much, he remembers he is human only long enough to give those around him a break, before diving right back in with restless energy. 

Chrome stood right beside him, yet he couldn’t feel farther from Senkuu. They pulled out statues, pieced them together, and each negative from Minami just added another level to the growing desperation in his eyes. 

Desperation. Chrome gets it. That feeling of wanting to save someone, but not having the means nor knowledge to do so— yet still trying  _ everything.  _

Desperation didn’t look good on anyone. He knew that because Kohaku had told him, once, that he looked like shit and would either get some rest, or Kohaku would tie him to his bed and leave him there until the next day.

But right now, they weren’t fighting some slow sickness with a years-long time limit. 

Right now, the sooner they had who they needed, the better— or there would be more dead bodies for them to bury. 

So he stands beside Senkuu, bumps shoulders with him, and reminds him to at least drink some water and rest himself before they jump back into work. 

And he cuts a mile from his mental list of things to do when this is over, and adds a single, large point consisting of him, Ruri, and everyone he cares about just taking a moment to rest. 

They need,  _ deserve _ it, after everything that’s happened. 

  
  
  
  
  


Ryoushi Kobayashi remembers screams. He remembers dropping everything and running— limping— to the window, shoving people aside, and staring at the oncoming flash of green with a sense of dread and hopelessness. 

It’s suddenly dark, and he figures that he must finally be dead as unconsciousness claims him. 

His last thought is a half-hearted prayer to a god he doesn’t believe in that the rest of the people— patients, doctors,  _ good people—  _ weren’t all following him along. 

Then, like an act of said god, he’s suddenly staring at the sky. 

Flat on his back, mind whirring to life, the first thing he notices is that the constant pain in his leg is finally gone. As is the stiffness and aching in his back and shoulders. He feels like he hasn’t in decades. He also feels like there’s an uncomfortable amount of dirt and rocks shoved into his clothes—clothes he doesn’t remember putting on.

The second thing he notices is he isn’t alone. 

He manages to restrain his first instinct—to get out of the crowd—and sits up. 

It’s a bunch of kids. 

A bunch of kids, in the middle of what looks like a barren cliff, dirty and exhausted and— he can see in their eyes— in some form of desperation.

Some are older than others, some look foreign— with the same blue eyes and blond hair as his own— and one looks different from all the rest, hair sticking up but just as unkempt as the rest of them, eyes red and sharp and heavy and honestly, Ryoushi didn’t usually deal with kids, but this one made him want to drag him into a hug and sit the hell down until he didn’t look like he’d faint. 

Each and every one of them had something like that weighing on their shoulders. 

And no teenager was supposed to look as beaten as he sometimes saw himself when he looked in the mirror.

They stare at him. He stares back. He subtly glances past them all and can see no sign of Tokyo’s looming skyscrapers— no sign of any real civilization whatsoever, it’s all trees and hills and nature. He refocuses on the kids. 

“So…” He starts, pulling on the front of his shirt and blinking at the chunks of earth that fall out. “Anybody know what’s going on here?”

“Ryoushi Kobayashi?” The kid up front— the one with the wild hair— asks, stepping forward. 

Ryoushi pushes himself to his feet and shakes out his shirt some more. He isn’t offered a hand, so he doesn’t offer one back, “That’d be me. You are?”

“Senkuu,” is the answer. He raises his eyebrow at the use of just a first name. He’s met with a flat and calculating stare, and it would make sense that exactly none of these kids trust him right off the bat, despite apparently knowing him already. 

“Well, there he is,” his attention is drawn to a young woman in a rather tight dress, crossing her arms and glaring around defensively. “Keep up your end of things. I’m leaving.”

She walks away. 

No one makes a move to stop her. 

Ryoushi watches her go. He lifts a hand to his temple and tries to stave off the incoming headache, pushing aside the  _ what the fuck is happening  _ and focusing instead on the  _ what do I do first.  _

“I assume that since you know me you need me for something?” He can’t help the tired sigh that follows, and even if his body doesn’t necessarily hold the bone-deep ache that followed him way too early on in years— another thing, how the fuck was he as spry as he was in his twenties?— he can still feel the phantom echo of it.

He bends his fingers back in that old stretching habit of his and watches the kids glance around at each other.

Except Senkuu, the obvious ‘leader’ of them all, who looks him up and down once more and says, “Long story short, the world of 3,700 years ago is gone, a… _ man  _ was revived about a year ago that tried to force his way into taking over and left some people in fucking awful shape. We need you to save their lives.” He pauses. 

Ryoushi blinks. Closes his eyes. Turns his head skywards. And decides to ignore everything else in that sentence aside from “save their lives.”

“Right,” he says, nodding and staring at the kid. “That’s what I do. Lead the way.”

Senkuu grins. 

Ryoushi wonders what the hell he’s gotten himself dragged into this time. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caution: I am not a doctor. :P

Yo watches the doc work from across the room, he and the Senkuu kid having a very fast and confusing conversation about every individual in the tent’s condition.

He hears his name maybe twice as they’re working over Saionji. And he can’t fucking  _ believe  _ that guy was still alive. Not after what Tsukasa had apparently done to him. And he hadn’t seen him in  _ months,  _ how the  _ fuck _ was that guy alive?

He’d be the first to admit he was kind of useless. Former police officer who didn’t even have a decent shot, not compared to the former military man, and with a reputation for being a “loud-mouthed abuser of power” as the Minami chick had decided to call him. He wondered why the hell Tsukasa woke a person like  _ him  _ up. He wasn’t anything special. 

He guessed it didn’t matter. 

The doc’s voice is sharp but calm enough— calmer than any of these panicking kids were— that he closes his eyes and pretends Saionji isn’t on the verge of dying, the Senkuu kid didn’t look way to young for this shit, and the world wasn’t long fucking gone and a fucked up aftermath left in it’s place. 

Nope. None of that existed. It was just him, the scratchy, hastily made mattress, the fucking stab wound in his gut, and that steady, serious conversation going on across the room. 

Except, it did exist. All of it existed. Every word he heard drove that point home. 

“... burns, fractures in his left wrist, hands and both legs, sounds like there’s fluid in his lungs, has he had the fever since you found him?”

“Three days now, probably had it longer. Infection.”

“Lacerations, infected and inflamed,” the doc mutters, “anything in the way of medicine?”

“Antibiotics.”

“No anesthesia… Can you make any painkillers?”

“On it.”

He wonders where all these kids found ways to want to fucking murder each other. 

Even Tsukasa—  _ fucking insane as he was—  _ was what, not even twenty?  _ How the fuck could a kid do all this?  _ It was brutal. It made him fucking tired to think about. How the hell did Senkuu even know how to make  _ fucking deadly explosives, and why the fuck did it even come to that— _

He’d been a shitty police officer. He still was a shitty police officer. 

Damnit, wasn’t he supposed to deal with shit like this so it didn’t get worse? Not laze around with a fucking gut wound—

He tries to sit up and immediately regrets it, falling back to the bed with a grunt. 

“Yo, right?” The doc doesn’t even look up. “Don’t move or you’ll pull the stitching.”

“Yeah, watever the fuck,” he wheezes, staying down. 

He was getting real fucking sick of this place.

  
  
  
  
  


It hurt.

It still hurt  _ less,  _ still, but it  _ hurt. _

He thinks he’s thought that before, but he can’t be bothered to remember where when he hears voices around the fuzz in his ears. 

_ Voices.  _ Multiple. He thinks the laugh that crawls its way out of his chest comes out a wheeze. 

_ He really was just that far gone, wasn’t he? _

There’s light shining through his eyelids, but none of it feels  _ real.  _

_ He’s still trapped. Hands still bound. Darkness all around except when Tsukasa showed up with that torch— wait, did Tsukasa burn him before or after he blindfolded him?— both, probably— _

He hisses. Something  _ stings  _ and it  _ hurts  _ and it’s  _ too loud.  _

He thinks he recognizes both the voices. Then something settles over his ears.

_ He can’t see, he can’t hear, how long has it been? How many times has Tsukasa shown up? How much food and water has been shoved down his throat? How much of it has he puked up? Did it matter?  _

He tries to jerk his head away. Tries to pull his hands up to pull whatever it is on them  _ off.  _ He wants to  _ hear. Really hear.  _ Even if— even if it’s just all in his head—

“Ukyou Saionji, sit still or I’ll tie you to the goddamn bed.”

Somehow, that muffled command breaks through even his jumbled thoughts, and he freezes. 

It’s sharp and commanding and  _ familiar, he doesn’t forget a voice, whose voice is that? _

He can’t figure it out. Everything is muffled again. Quiet.  _ Quiet.  _ He  _ hates it.  _

A hand brushes through his hair.

Maybe he was just dreaming. 

He leans into it. 

He leans into it and forgets that he even exists, because it hurts too much and it sounds too quiet and he feels too hot but cold at the same time. 

_ Cold. Quiet. It hurts.  _

_ Tsukasa shoves him up against the wall.  _

_ Tsukasa leaves a stone knife embedded in his arm for way too long.  _

_ Tsukasa drags something hot and burning across his skin.  _

_ Tsukasa leaves him to starve and throw up nothing.  _

_ Tsukasa grabs him by the hair and slowly breaks his fingers.  _

_ Tsukasa shoves him underwater and he can’t see, can’t hear, what was he going to do next— _

A hand brushes lightly along his forehead. 

He wonders if it’ll be gone if he passes out. 

He wonders if it’ll turn violent and wake him up. 

He doesn’t think he has a choice between the two as his mind grows fuzzy and his own heart pounds in his ears. 

_ He should have kept his mouth shut.  _

A flash of fearful eyes and heartbeats and he  _ can’t let this happen anymore— _

_ He never could have kept his mouth shut.  _

And somehow, with the thought that this, all this pain, was inevitable, his mind gets dragged into unconsciousness once more.

  
  
  
  
  


Senkuu sits back in a chair and closes his eyes, and the next time he opens them, the sun has gone down.

He doesn’t feel particularly rested, having slept in a chair, and his mouth feels disgusting and his body and mind are slow to come back online. He spends a moment staring at the far wall of the tent, wondering when the last time he actually laid down to sleep was.

“You should probably go find somewhere to rest.”’

He lifts his head and finds Kobayashi sitting on the other side of the bed. Ukyou’s bed. Ukyou is actually resting significantly easier, wrapped up tight in bandages, the cloth still over his eyes and ears. It wasn’t tight, wasn’t restricting, but it keeps him calm, at least, while he’s healing.

Senkuu thinks that’s really messed up.

He bites his cheek, sighs and lets it go— because there isn’t anything he can do about that, why focus on it— and looks at Kobayashi, who watches him and waits.

“Yeah, I’m not leaving just yet,” he says back. Kobayashi stares at him a moment, then shrugs. 

Senkuu watches Kobayashi turn away, lean back in his chair, and keep one eye on Ukyou. He remembers earlier, when he’d seen the determination in the man’s eyes when he’d seen the people in the infirmary.

The shock at seeing Ukyou.

He thinks it could simply be because of the severity of injuries. He thinks it could just be the obvious signs of torture on him. But, somehow, Senkuu didn’t believe for a second that this would have caused that hiccup in the man’s demeanor.

“You know him?”

He sees Kobayashi blink. Not surprised, just curious. “Yeah. Met him back when he was a recruit. I was his doctor for a while.”

Senkuu nods. Looks away, checks over everyone else in the infirmary. He sees Kinrou with a fresh set of bandages around his head, Ginrou leaning over the bed and asleep. Yo’s still in the corner, but looks like he’s passed out as well. Some of the others were gone.

“Checked them all out while you were out,” Kobayashi supplies. “Guy over there,” he points at Yo, “is gonna live, give him a day or two and he needs to start walking more.” He points to another of Tsukasa’s muscle men, “They’ve got some minor burns, he has a fractured leg, she’s got a case of infection.” Another point to Kinrou, “Head injury. Healing well enough, but if he’s not conscious soon I’d say we need to make sure he still gets nutrients.”

Senkuu follows all of this, mind continuing to wake up as he files all the information away. Then Kobayashi points to Ukyou, “He’s gonna need a bit more time. I’d give him something to knock him out for a while, but I’m not an anesthesiologist, so he’s gonna need a watch in case he keeps waking up like that so he doesn’t pull all the stitching. Or hurt himself more.”

“What about the… blindfold?” Senkuu asks, slowly. He remembers the way Ukyou’s hands had jerked up in an effort to take the thing off.

Kobayashi closes his eyes and sighs. “You said four months?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s gonna be rough,” Kobayashi says. “He’s not gonna be… coherent for a while. Isolation does that to people.” His voice gets quieter. “The sensory deprivation just adds to the mess. Hallucinations, not knowing where he is, who he is, maybe, at times…” 

Kobayashi trails off, eyes still closed, and they fall into silence.

“Let him heal. Then we can work on that,” Senkuu hears. He crosses his arms and watches the rise and fall of Ukyou’s chest. 

He’s guilty.

Senkuu knows that. He knows that he’s feeling guilty for causing this. For waking up Tsukasa in the first place— and Ukyou’s just one person that’s been hurt because of that. If he’d been a little more careful, if he’d been a little more prepared, a little faster—

He shakes his head. He doesn’t do what-ifs, no matter how much he’s at fault. There are things to do. Too much to make up for to wonder what could have been.

He wonders what’s keeping him stuck to Ukyou, though.

He wonders if it’s the fact he was the one person they’d found locked up that wasn’t dead. If it’s knowing he’d  _ lived _ through four months of Tsukasa’s torture. If it had anything to do with the fact that earlier, when he’d run his hand through Ukyou’s hair, the other had leaned into it.

He rubs that hand with his other.

If he could offer some form of comfort, if he could  _ help,  _ maybe he could make up for it even a little.

“So,” Kobayashi’s voice draws him out of his thoughts. Senkuu looks up and finds himself on the receiving end of an expression he can’t read, “mind filling me in on the details? What’s this about  _ three thousand and seven hundred years?” _

Senkuu snorts at the man’s disbelief. “Yeah. Guess it’s time to start from the top, again.”

He starts explaining, from the moment he woke up— it takes longer than usual, with the detour they make in energy conservation and usage when he was in the stone. Senkuu appreciates it, though. 

He appreciates how Kobayashi doesn’t linger on the shock of him staying awake that entire time, like everyone else did.

How Kobayashi takes things as they are and keeps offering suggestions on his theories.

How Kobayashi laughs when he brings up the alien theory.

Senkuu appreciates not being the only one keeping people alive.

  
  
  
  
  


Ginrou knows he’s weak. 

He knows he’s just a coward and a wimp and he can’t even protect himself, much less his brother. No, it’s always been his brother protecting him. Always been Kinrou jumping into danger while he sat back and cried and whined and  _ ran.  _

Ginrou knows he’s pretty much useless. 

He was useless as he saw one of Tsukasa’s men running toward him. Useless as Kinrou shoved him aside. Useless as his brother took a blow meant for him and useless to keep him safe— Kohaku had been the one to defend them. 

And he’s useless to help his brother right now. 

That guy Senkuu brought back— that doctor. He had said he didn’t know when Kinrou would wake up. 

_ “But you’re supposed to be really smart and take care of these things, aren’t you!?” _

_ “I’m just a man, kid, and the facts are, with what I have, I can’t do much more for him.” _

Ginrou knows he can’t do anything.

_ Why do you keep doing these things for me? _

Why did it have to be Kinrou?

_ Why did it have to be his brother? _

_ What was he supposed to do now? _

Ginrou wanted answers, wanted  _ his brother back,  _ wanted things to go back to normal, to quit feeling even  _ more  _ worthless than he did before. 

No one was going to hand any of that to him. 

He takes every request in stride, and he realizes that this is what Suika must usually feel like when she said she just wanted to  _ help  _ and everyone kept pushing her off. 

Like he doesn’t have anything worthwhile to add. 

Like he’s just an add-on to his brother and the others that can’t actually do much. 

He latches on to every request that comes his way and sits by his brother’s side every other moment he can get. 

Suika and Yuzuriha are the ones that remind him to eat. 

  
He promises to himself never to let them get hurt, because he doesn’t think he could stand it if someone else that even cared a  _ smidge  _ about him and his presence got hurt.


	6. Chapter 6

With Kobayashi here, Yuzuriha is finally able to go back to the hut she and Taiju call their own, curl up under a blanket— the one she sewed a little bird caricature into the corner of— and finally fall asleep.

She doesn’t sleep long. 

Drifting has her dreaming, and dreaming has her remembering. 

The explosions. The screams. She had only been at a distance, waiting to help afterward when the fighting began. Taiju had gone with Senkuu. 

And when the first of five explosions had hit, she had held her breath. 

The second, and she had covered her ears because it was  _ loud  _ and there were people  _ screaming.  _

The third, and there was a pause. She had thought it over. 

The fourth and fifth were quick and together, and they had made the earth beneath her feet quake 

Yuzuriha doesn’t sleep long. There wouldn’t be anything but false memories of Taiju lying in one of those infirmary beds.

She wakes up with tears in her eyes and a Taiju snoring in the other bed across the room. She wakes up and pulls the blanket over her shoulders and curls around her fur-stuffed pillow and watches Taiju’s chest rise and fall, all the funny faces he makes when he sleeps, and waits for the sun to come back up. 

They’ve all been busy. 

So, so busy— enough that she barely got to see much of Taiju during the day. First, she had been working in the infirmary, then she had been helping rebuild the section of the settlement that had gotten destroyed during the fighting, then she had been helping unload the supplies that Senkuu had brought back from the village he had found— a village, and  _ entire village,  _ all on his side, and she hadn’t felt more relieved to know he had people on his side. 

_ Ishigami Village.  _ She still hadn’t asked what that meant.

“Yuzuriha?”

“Hm?” She looks at Taiju again and realizes he’s awake. Awake and looking worried, and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen Taiju more worried than the time they’ve spent in this place. “Ah, sorry, Taiju.” She wipes at the tears in her eyes. “I’m okay. I promise.”

“Are you sure?” He asks, and she pulls her blanket tighter. 

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m just… tired.”

“... okay,” he says. He lies back on his back and stares at the ceiling. 

“Taiju?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad you’re here with me.”

“Me, too.”

  
  
  
  
  


Ryoushi catalogues things as time passes.

Senkuu rarely leaves the infirmary, and even then, it’s only because someone ended up needing his help elsewhere. He’s bordering on sleep deprived, and more than once Ryoushi has had to throw a sheet over his head and tell him to get some rest. The kid takes up permanent residence in the bed beside Ukyou, and there’s… a constant weight on his shoulders. The weight of responsibility and failure. Ryoushi can put the pieces together. Senkuu explained enough to him, and even if the kid never spoke of his own feelings, he couldn’t hide the bags under his eyes and the strain in his voice.

Ginro is the other constant resident of the infirmary tent, aside from the two remaining patients. Though he does leave for longer periods of time than Senkuu, he never wanders far from his brother’s side—still unresponsive, thankfully breathing well on his own. He sits vigilant and quiet and keeps out of the way.

The girl, Yuzuriha, visits and restocks anything they may need. She’s deft with her hands and cautious, if warily trusting. Chrome, one of the people from this time—time, a small civilization, thousands of years old, it still boggles the mind—appears to take orders from Senkuu or ask prudent questions, and looks like he’s trying to hold the entire place together through his own force of will.

Others come in and out, on errands or with supplies, or simply to visit. But despite the activity, it isn’t busy. It’s mostly tired and quiet and subdued, and nothing like what Ryoushi would expect out of a group of teens this large.

He sighs and feels a phantom pain in his leg. Then there was the  _ reason  _ things were like this. The mysterious light and the statues and fallen civilization, all of which these kids had been struggling to survive through on top of the maniac that had put them through another brand of hell.

And even that man had been a child, too.

Ryoushi almost wants to crawl back into that earthen shell than deal with the mess of teenage trauma this has become.

But someone has to pull that muted panic off of Senkuu’s shoulders, and someone has to gather that responsibility off of Chrome’s. Someone has to keep Ukyou and Kinrou alive.  _ Someone  _ has to pick up these pieces and try to help these kids, strong and brilliant and survivors, get back on their feet. 

Ryoushi never could leave things be when someone was in pain.

  
  
  
  
  


Gen is wary of their new doctor.

Wary, but not necessarily suspicious. The man has done nothing but help them, after all. Nothing but save lives and heal, and Gen could tell by the way he never so much as entertained the idea of stopping that Ryoushi Kobayashi had a healthy respect for life.

That earned him some points. 

But there were some things about the man Gen couldn’t get a read on. Kobayashi was sharp, observant, and his thoughts weren’t easily read in his movements nor in any reply he gave Gen the few moments they had spoken. Gen didn’t know what the man wanted, who he really was, nor what he could do to guarantee they wouldn’t have a traitor in their midst.

No one in the Kingdom of Science needed that,right now. Least of all Senkuu.

“Doin’ alright, Gen?”

Gem doesn’t jump. He simply glances up from his thoughts and gives the man beside the infirmary bed an easy smile, “I’m perfectly fine, Kobayashi-san. Thank you for your concern.”

The man doesn’t raise an eyebrow in disbelief. His eyes don’t twitch and his lips remain downturned in that contemplative frown that hasn’t left his face since he was brought here. Kobayashi stares at him and Gen can’t even find a twitch that would give him an answer as to what sorts of thoughts are going through the man’s head.

Gen hates that it unnerves him. Hates to admit that there was a person in any time that he couldn’t read.

Kobayashi eventually refocuses on the bed, on the shuddering rise and fall of Ukyou Saionji’s chest, and the quiet breaths Senkuu gave from where he had fallen asleep at the small table beside the tent wall. Kinrou was on his own for once—much too restless to sleep, Gen had deduced, seeing him pacing around the village despite it being the middle of the night.. Gen had come to visit, make sure things were going well. If Gen were  _ honest,  _ though, he was here to settle the paranoia gnawing at his mind.

“How are you adjusting, Kobayashi-san?”

“Adjusting?” Kobayashi lifts his eyes and looks up at the canvas above them. “I think I’m still accepting… all of this, to be honest.”

Gen waits. Waits to see if there would be more, an elaboration, but Kobayashi also holds his tongue.

“What about you, kid?”

“Hm?” Gen tilts his head cluelessly. 

Kobayashi sighs, scratches his head languidly, and—

“You really care about them a lot, huh?”

Gen doesn’t blink. “Whatever do you mean, Kobayashi-san?”

A ghostly smile finds its way onto the man’s face, “You’re a careful guy. Tough, too.”

“Hmm, I’m still not quite sure I understand~.”

“That’s fine,” the man waves a hand and shakes his head. “Just take it as a compliment.”

“... compliments are not freely given, Kobayashi-san.” Gen says after a moment. “Might there be something you’re in need of?”

“Maybe.” Kobayashi shrugs. Gen doesn’t grit his teeth. “But it’s not something I can get just by asking.”

“That sounds… quite troublesome.”

“You have no idea, kid.”

The conversation pauses once more. Gen wonders if this man knows how infuriating he is.

Then, Ukyou inhales sharply. 

The change is almost instant.

Kobayashi stands from his seat and hovers, vigilantly, as the white-haired man in the cot starts muttering and twitching, words Gen can’t make out. The doctor’s eyes are hard but no longer unreadable—true worry and fear and willingness to help on his face.

As Kobayashi waits to see if he needs to intervene, bags under his eyes in the dead of night, with Saionji in the throes of a nightmare, Gen wonders when he became so paranoid.

Thankfully, the muttering settles and Saionji quietens. Kobayashi closes his eyes and breathes, and gathers himself quite efficiently. Gen wonders if he could learn that kind of compartmentalizing from the man.

Gen waits until Kobayashi returns to his seat before speaking. “... then, if I may ask, why did you become a doctor, Kobayashi-san?”

The man closes his eyes and tilts his head, arms crossed and one ankle resting on his knee. “That  _ is  _ an old story…”

Gen waits. This time, he doesn’t let the impatience get the best of him. 

Kobayashi casts him a glance. Sighs again. Rubs the back of his neck, and that’s surprisingly more body language than Gen’s seen from him until this point. “I hate sitting still while things need to be done and people need help.”

Gen smiles, “You know, that sounds like something Senkuu-chan would say.”

Kobayashi hums, “Really, now. No wonder the kid likes me.”

“Take care of them, Kobayashi-chan.”

“Take care of yourself before I put you on bedrest, doctor’s orders. Don’t think I don’t notice sleep deprivation.”

“My, that’s quite hypocritical of you~.”

“Shut it, kid.”

  
  
  
  
  


Jumbled. His thoughts are jumbled and  _ something  _ is too loud in his ears. 

_ Voices. _

“Remember to keep it down, Big Oaf,” says one.

“Sorry!” Is the attempted whisper that follows.

Something isn’t right. No, there is something very, very wrong about this.

_ Where…? _

Where what? He isn’t sure what he’s asking. What he wants to know. It’s too jumbled up.

It takes him too long to realize he can move.

He twitches a hand. Tries to turn his head. Ends up inhaling wrong and coughing and— _ shit, shit, it hurts, it hurts why does it hurt—? _

_ Tsukasa. _

That name, the face that comes with it, the  _ eyes  _ that follow, make everything else fade away.

_ No. No. No.  _

He can’t make out why, can’t remember, can’t pull any solid memory from the tangle of moments in his mind, but he  _ knows  _ that he’s  _ afraid. _

“Ukyou.”

He doesn’t know that voice.

But… it isn’t  _ Tsukasa. _

Tsukasa’s voice is commanding, bold, smooth and heavy and—

This one is careful. Scared—

_ Why are they scared? _

A hand brushes over his forehead. It’s light. It’s almost too much, but the moment he tries to impulsively pull away, he freezes.

He opens his mouth and breathes, and ends up coughing again.

“Damnit- Taiju, go get Kobayashi.”

“Right!”

_ Kobayashi. _

That name is familiar, too. But something is still  _ wrong— _

“Ukyou.” That voice again. Careful. Scared.  _ Trying  _ to be calm. “Can you hear me?”

He answers that— _ Ukyou,  _ that’s his name, this person knew him—by slowly nodding his head.

“Okay,” is the breathless reply. “Okay. Just hold tight for the doc to get here, okay?”

Ukyou wants to say something. Ask why it all  _ hurts—Tsukasa— _ but it’s hard to focus on anything when everything is too much.

His head hurts.

It’s too loud.

He’s  _ tired. _

“He’s awake?”

That voice is new.

New and  _ familiar,  _ and—

_ Kobayashi. _

He knew this person.

How did he know this person?

He settles for simply knowing that the name doesn’t terrify him.

“Hey, kid.” It’s Ukyou he’s speaking to, he knows. “I’m gonna give you some water, okay? Drink it slowly.”

A cup is held to his lips. He… can’t remember when the last time  _ Tsukasa  _ gave him water was. He almost wished this didn’t just mean more pain to come. That  _ Tsukasa  _ wasn’t  _ done. _

His head throbs and he almost chokes on the water— _ drowning, cold, wet, pain— _ but the cup is pulled away just as quickly, and… it’s gentler than he remembers.

“Kid,” he hears. “One to ten?”

“N-” A voice, hoarse and strained and— _ his  _ voice starts responding on its own. “Ni...ne?”

“Fuckin’ ten, then.”

Something like sheepishness flares in his mind. He twitches, and it fades away again.

“... it’d be a mistake to try muting. Go back to sleep, kid.”

“K-Ko--”

_ “Sleep.”  _ Order. A familiar tone of voice. “Reports later.”

He realizes how much the pain had been clawing at his mind. How much the chaos of his thoughts was trying to pull him back into oblivion and—

He doesn’t argue.


End file.
